In data center environments, rack units may house many server devices, such as blade servers. Each server device may be configured to host one or more physical or virtual host devices. The servers in the rack units are connected to switch devices such as Top of Rack (ToR) switch devices. The switches, in turn, are connected to other switches via a spine switch or spine fabric. Data in a communication session may be exchanged between host devices (physical and/or virtual) in the same or different rack units. For example, packets of data in the session may be sent from a host device in one rack unit to a host device in another rack unit using network or fabric links. Fabric networks provide cross-connections between multiple fabric links on the same linecard or across multiple linecards. A fabric link may include multiple fabric lanes in each fabric link.
In a fabric, significant power is consumed by the serial input/output devices used to communicate over the fabric links. For example, consider a fabric with 28 fabric links, with each link consisting of 8 fabric lanes. If each lane includes a serializer/deserializer which consumes 240 mW of power in a specific period of time, 53.7 W of power are consumed for a single fabric during that time. During the period in which the fabric link is not fully utilized, each serializer/deserializer still consumes peak power.